Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (8 page)

As the Greens and others demonstrated in the streets, and the mansion of a prominent government official went up in flames, the home guard deserted their positions on the city walls.

“Throughout the night the people swarmed around, shouting obscene slogans and filthy insults against the emperor and hurled insults and even made fun of the Patriarch,” noted Theophanes. At midnight, Maurice at last realized his position was untenable. After shedding “his official insignia and dress, and clad as a private citizen, he boarded a warship at midnight with his wife, children and [his most trusted official] Constantine [Lardys] and sought safety by fleeing.”
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Germanus tried to bribe the Greens into making him emperor, but they turned him down. Instead, they left the city and joined forces with the mutineers’ leader, Phocas. Phocas immediately convened a conference to decide who should be emperor and was himself nominated by the Greens and others. He was then crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople in the great church of St. John the Baptist, just outside the metropolis, and entered the capital two days later in the imperial chariot.

The following week a reign of terror began. Phocas decided to eliminate the former imperial family completely, so “he sent soldiers with orders to kill Maurice and his family.

“His five boys,” wrote Theophanes, “were first killed before the emperor’s own eyes, thereby first punishing the emperor through the murder of his children.
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Maurice bore the tragedy with firmness of mind, continuously invoking God, the presider over all things, and saying reflectively over and over again: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, and just are thy judgements.’ ” Then the former emperor himself was executed.

Phocas issued orders that the heads of Maurice and his sons be put on public display. According to Theophanes, “The citizens all went out of the city to witness this show while the heads rotted.”

Maurice’s wife and daughters were not executed at this time but were placed in a convent.
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Other supporters of the former government were systematically rounded up and murdered. The former praetorian prefect, Constantine Lardys, and Maurice’s eldest son, Theodosius, were executed at the Diadromos (probably a stadium),
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while the army’s commander in chief, the patrician Comentiolus, “was slain on the far side of the Golden Horn [waterway], by the Church of St. Conon, by the shore, and his body was eaten by the dogs.”
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The following year the empire began to feel the repercussions of revolution. Both internally and externally, the destabilization caused by the mutiny and the fall of Maurice began to make itself felt. In Constantinople, riots broke out. The new authorities, ruthless as they were, lost control, and a large section of the city was burned to the ground by disaffected citizens. The leader of the Greens, who had helped bring Phocas to power, was himself killed in the mayhem.

Externally, the relationship between the Roman Empire and its archrival, the Persian Empire, was fatally undermined. The Persian ruler, Chosroes II, had enjoyed an extremely cordial relationship with Maurice (to whom he owed both his life and his throne).
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He was very angry when he heard that his friend had been murdered, and refused point-blank even to receive ambassadors from the new Roman government.
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The mutiny and revolution not only resulted in civil unrest but also split the army itself in places. In the east, an experienced Roman general, Narses—who had in the past been much feared by the Persians—rebelled against Phocas, took control of the city of Edessa (now Urfa in southeastern Turkey), and “wrote to King Chosroes begging him to assemble his army and invade Roman territory.”
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In direct response to the destabilization of the Roman imperium, the Persians swooped like vultures on the stricken empire in late 603. At the first encounter the Roman commander, Germanus, was fatally wounded, and Phocas withdrew troops from the Avar frontier to the new Persian one. At the first major battle—at the river Arzamon (near Mardin in southeastern Turkey) in early 604—the imperial forces were utterly crushed.

Theophanes wrote that the Persian king “drew up his elephants like a camp and gave battle, winning a great victory and capturing very many Romans, whom he beheaded.” The Roman general Leontius escaped the Persians but was arrested on Phocas’ orders and brought in chains to Constantinople. The rebel Narses was then finally apprehended, and publicly burned to death in the capital.

Order was also breaking down in Antioch, Palestine, and Egypt, the sources of at least a third of the empire’s tax revenues. In Antioch people were cut down by troops as they assembled in the city’s major church, and according to the historian John of Nikiu, the slaughter continued until the soldiers “filled every building with blood.” The Antioch unrest was finally suppressed by a Roman general who had the rebels strangled, burned, drowned, or “fed to wild beasts.”

In Egypt, anti-Phocas rebels attacked the local Roman governor and “put him and his followers to the sword”; five Egyptian cities fell to the rebels.
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And by late 603 or 604, although Phocas had paid out a fortune in peace payments to the Avars, their vassals, the Slavs, could not resist invading the empire once Roman troops had been withdrawn to fight the Persians. One frequent target for the Slavs appears to have been Thessalonica, which is known to have been unsuccessfully attacked in October 604 by an army of around five thousand Slavs, whose war cries the citizens’ “ears were well accustomed” to hearing.
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A true dark age had begun to descend on the “Eternal Empire.”

The following year, 605, was no improvement on its predecessor. More blood flowed in Constantinople, and the Persians overran all of Roman Mesopotamia. The new praetorian prefect, a man by the name of Theodosius, who had succeeded to the job when the previous incumbent was executed, was in turn put to death, as were six other prominent officials. All were beheaded except one, who “had his tongue cut out and was spread-eagled on a stretcher and dragged about [the city] for a show” before being “taken down to the shore where his eyes were removed and he was thrown into a small boat and burnt.”
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Whether drink, madness, or merely the intoxicating effect of total power was to blame for Phocas’ conduct is not known. It was probably a mixture of all three. In 606, for instance, at his daughter’s wedding, he became insanely jealous of the bride and bridegroom and started making preparations to have his own supporters executed for praising the newly-weds too enthusiastically. And in 607 and 608, after uncovering evidence of dishonesty, he ordered the killing of dozens of leading political and administrative figures—including the late Emperor Maurice’s wife, Constantina, and their three daughters, whom he had executed outside the city gate in the same ditch in which Maurice had been dispatched.

The other victims that year were either burned alive after having their hands and feet cut off, strangled, or simply beheaded. Entire families were wiped out, notably any relatives of Maurice and the former general, Comentiolus, whom Phocas had disliked even before the mutiny.

While Constantinople reeked of fear and of spilled patrician blood, the Persians seized the Roman Empire’s Armenian and eastern Anatolian provinces and began to threaten its very heartland. However, at last, Phocas’ power began to ebb away. Revolt started to erupt all over the empire. There was civil unrest in Constantinople; many citizens were killed or thrown into prison. The Greens, formerly Phocas’ supporters, accused him of drunken lunacy. “You have drunk again from the goblet, you are losing your senses again,” they shouted.
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But the increasingly paranoid emperor responded by “chopping off the limbs of many of them and hanging them in the middle of the [city’s chariot-racing] stadium.” Others he beheaded or “tied in sacks and threw into the open sea.”

At this point civil war broke out in earnest. In the capital, the Greens rioted, burned the city administrative offices, and opened up the prisons. In Antioch the Jewish population also staged a revolt and seized the local Christian patriarch, stuffing his severed testicles into his mouth and dragging him, still alive, through the city before killing him. The homes of the rich were then burned to the ground. In the great north African city of Carthage, the son of the region’s leading politician—a young man called Heraclius—set sail with a fleet of ships bound ultimately for Constantinople. His aim was to remove Phocas and become emperor himself.

Meanwhile, numerous other plots were hatched against the emperor and yet more people were arrested and executed. Phocas, it seems, had grown bored with conventional beheadings, so he ordered one leading official to be used for archery target practice in the stadium and then had him suspended alive from a flagstaff at the emperor’s favorite barracks.

At last Heraclius’ fleet reached Constantinople, and Phocas’ reign came to an abrupt and fitting end. The Greens and others seized him and burned him alive. But while internally the nightmare was over, externally the empire’s problems were only just beginning.

“ T H E  C U P  O F
B I T T E R N E S S ”

A
lthough the empire’s internal bloodletting had largely come to an end with the accession of Heraclius, the process by which it was to lose 70 percent of its territory within thirty years continued apace. The destabilization of the empire’s relationship with the Persians and barbarians alike, which had followed the mutiny of 602, had done its damage. Pandora’s box had been opened, and the utmost efforts of even such a determined and stubborn ruler as Heraclius could not put the lid back on.

Theophanes, describing the chaotic state into which the empire had slipped, wrote that “Heraclius, on becoming emperor, found the whole Roman state in a terrible condition.

“For the Barbarians [the Avars and Slavs] had made Europe a desert, while the Persians had given over all Asia to ravaging and had led whole cities into captivity and had constantly swallowed up whole Roman armies.

“On seeing this, the emperor had grave doubts about what to do. For the army had entirely disintegrated. Of all the officers who had rebelled with Phocas against Maurice and were still alive, he found, on enquiry, only two still remaining with the legions.”

In the northwestern part of the empire, the Slavs smashed through Roman forces in the Istrian Peninsula and attacked all the major Roman towns of the Adriatic coast. Within three years most of the cities, some of the most prosperous in Europe, lay in ruins. The majority of the citizens had fled, their towns—Salona, Scardona, Narona, Risinium, Doclea, and Epidaurum—reduced to smoldering hulks.

Refugees either emigrated to Italy or poured into a few key defensible sites along the coast. The inhabitants of Epidaurum made their way to the coast and founded a new city, Ragusium (modern Dubrovnik). The refugees, determined to stand their ground in their new home, built a massive circuit of defensive walls, and survived. A few miles away the people of Risinium were probably responsible for the founding of Cattaro (modern Kotor in Montenegro). And 140 miles to the north, the people of Salona fled to the nearby coastal town of Split, where they converted the mausoleum of the third-century emperor Diocletian into a cathedral.¹ However, the much-venerated relics of Salona’s martyrs were spirited off to Rome as the Slavs closed in. Split, which had declined in the fifth and sixth centuries, was rebuilt by the refugees and became an important town. (Five hundred years later it was to play a vital role in helping to create the medieval Croatian state.)

All three places of refuge had one major thing in common: their access to water. Unlike the inland towns the refugees had fled from, Dubrovnik and Split were directly on the sea, while Kotor was on a fjordlike inlet. If necessary, all three could receive supplies from the sea, so barbarian land sieges would have been uncomfortable and inconvenient but not fatal.

Meanwhile, other Slav tribes—“an immense horde of Drogubites, Sagudates, Belegezites, Baiounetes and Berzetes”—descended on Greece and even attacked the Greek islands and parts of Anatolia (now Turkey).² It was at this time—roughly 610–620—that Greece underwent fundamental change at the hands of the barbarians. The largely Mediterranean ethnic makeup of Classical and Roman Greece was altered irreversibly as tens of thousands of Slav warriors invaded the area and then settled their families throughout the country.

An analysis of the surviving place names in Greece reveals that virtually every area of the country had substantial Slav communities from this time onward; indeed, several regions must have had majority Slav populations. Place-name research carried out in the 1930s by a German called Vasmer showed that even in this century around two thousand Slav place names survived throughout Greece.³ Seven hundred and thirty of them were found in northern Greece; a further 509 were in central Greece, 429 in the Peloponnese, and 382 in the rest of southern Greece.
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It was at this period that the Slavs appear to have started making use of seagoing boats for their military operations, raiding the Cyclades and the islands off Thessaly. What’s more, much of this maritime expansion seems to have been carried out through the skilled use of nothing more sophisticated than large dugout canoes. “They had discovered how to make boats dug out from a single tree trunk,” explained the author of
The
Miracles of St. Demetrius.
Modern analysis of place-name evidence confirms that they reached the islands, though to sail to some they must surely have had larger boats, perhaps captured ones.
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